Life in Culebrón

I'm not that keen on air-conditioning. When Maggie went to the UK for a few days a couple of weeks ago, I enjoyed turning off the aircon in the car and riding around with the windows down. I don't care for that "climate control" icy blast or the more insidious slow freezing of your knuckles. Then again rolling down the windows, with the resultant noise and the buffeting hot wind, isn't that comfy either. My main, anti aircon, gripe isn't temperature related - it's more about shutting the world out. One of the hallmarks of living in Southern Spain is that it’s hot in summer. It seems a bit perverse to come somewhere warm and then struggle to cool spaces to the point that they would be considered cold at other times of the year. Sometimes, it’s a blessed relief to settle back in an air-conditioned space, after getting super hot, but that’s not the same as maintaining a room at Stavanger in December levels with the Spanish summer just beyond the door. If I we...

As I get older and older, I often find myself remembering one thing from another. The link may be tenuous but that doesn't stop me. So, we'd just been to see María Terremoto in concert at the ADDA, and very good she was too. We'd done well; we'd driven through Alicante in both directions without putting a foot wrong, and parking had been dead easy. As we eased back onto the motorway heading for home, I commented on the white lines. They were nice and bright. They reminded me of a trip many years ago when the lines were far from bright. It was 2007, and Maggie had moved for a job in Ciudad Rodrigo. I was going to join her when a building job on the house in Culebron was completed but, for now and for the coming long weekend, I'd got a bus ticket to go over to see her. It's a long way to Ciudad Rodrigo, more or less on the Portuguese border, but I was hoping to get my head down on the bus. I knew the bus station in Elda; I went there for the 2 a.m. bus. It never c...

Every country has some sort of ritual, some sort of symbol, that pulls at the heartstrings and brings tears to the eyes of the true patriot. Maybe it's as the Stars and Stripes ripples in a gentle evening breeze, moments before the flag is struck, standing, hand on heart, thinking land of the free and home of the brave. It could be a Promenader at the Royal Albert Hall on the Last Night exercising their lungs to sing "Land of Hope and Glory". Sometimes the thing is official – "La Marseillaise" for the French almost anywhere and everywhere, or the adulation of the potato, the official state "vegetable" of the good folk of Idaho – and sometimes it's just the ink-black silhouette of a bull. If you've been to Spain you know how that one-dimensional bull stands sentinel over the roads and motorways of the country. If not, maybe you have friends – they may not actually be good friends – who have brought you back the mug with that black bull firmly as...

I like to be active, not climbing hills or doing press-ups active, but doing something out and about. I'm not keen on work as a substitute. I don't need to paint walls or clean the kitchen, prune trees, shop, cook, clean toilets or keep drains clear to keep myself occupied. We're all a bit work obsessed in my opinion. I did a lot of it at one time, the paid sort, and now I look back on it and wonder why I wasted all that time. The pay, obviously, but that doesn't explain its centrality in British society. So here I like to get out and about. We go to fiestas, we go to events, we visit castles, we go to the theatre and concerts and the cinema. We see exhibitions, we go to talks and tramp around forests for stargazing and to hunt out scorpions. Some things are never repetitive, even though you've done them before, because each event is different enough to make it potentially memorable. On the other hand there are some things which are so much of a muchness and start t...